Stanley Whitney: Drawings
8 September – 21 October 2017

Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal
possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and
all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. His
exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York will be the first major presentation of
his drawings, highlighting important works from 1989 to the present. Whitney’s
works on paper are a critical component of his practice, in which he develops
his spatial structure and experiments with the placement of color.

Whitney’s signature format revolves around his use of
a loose grid and it is within his sketchbooks and drawings that Whitney works
through the abstract structure of colored blocks and lines, testing
combinations, arrangements, density and transparency of colors to evoke a sense
of rhythm and cadence. Whitney has
noted: “For me, drawing is a way to understand where things are in space. I
felt that I needed to work on space because I didn’t want my color to be
decorative. I wanted color to have real intellect.”

In Whitney’s work, color functions as both the design,
creating shape and arrangement, and also as the energy, simultaneously
attracting and distracting from the color laid beside it. The colors are meant
to be seen next to and in relation to the others, rather than as individual
blocks. While the drawings and paintings share the importance of space and sequencing
of hue — and the gesture of the paintings maintain a sketching quality with the
deliberate presence of the artist’s hand — the works on paper do not adhere to
a square format as the paintings do. Instead, they tend to fill the rectangular
page. Thus, by their format alone the drawings allow for an entirely fresh
approach to the grid and pose a different challenge to creating the desired
‘call and response’ between colors. They incorporate a wider variety of color
and texture — Whitney uses mediums including colored pencil, graphite, acrylic
marker and crayon on surfaces as varied as Indian paper, Japanese rice papers
and cardboard.

In his early
drawings Whitney experiments with space in a freer format, with marks that are
gestural and loose and the areas of color or space between horizontals are
sparse and circular. Following a visit to Italy and Egypt in the early 1990s, he
begins to experiment with the density of the color within the structure, as
inspired by the classical and ancient architecture of the regions. Building
these blocks of color, stacked on top of one another across the horizontal
lines, the structure becomes more organized and the grids more precise and
angular over the following decades.

To accompany the
exhibition, the gallery will publish a facsimile of one of Whitney’s
sketchbooks, illustrating his working process and the way in which he
orchestrates shape and color.